With the development of the computer network technology, Instant Messaging (IM) tools have been accepted by most users, and have become an essential part of users' daily life and work. By IM tools, users can achieve communication and exchanges with friends, colleagues and classmates.
Microblog is a part of the IM tool application with a lower technical requirement for access. With the help of microblog, a user can instantly express his own feelings with a sentence comprising about 140 words, and share them with those users paying attention to him. The user can edit microblog messages in the microblog window, and view microblog messages that have been received. A presentation of a microblog message mainly includes a homepage message presentation, a page message presentation and private message presentation.
In actual application, microblog is a user relationship-based platform for information sharing, spreading and obtaining. On this platform, for instance, taking the homepage message presentation as an example, a user can, on the page (homepage) for homepage message presentation on the IM client, view the messages published by his friends whom he is interested in. The client arranges the messages according to the time they are published. That is to say, the message published most recently is put to the top, while those published earlier are put to the bottom. Messages are presented on the homepage, so that a user can learn his friends' latest state from the homepage very conveniently according to the presented messages. In microblog, a user can follow persons whom he is interested in, and in the meantime, other users can also follow this user. After a relevant relationship chain is established, all messages published by the user can be followed by his followers.
Microblog messages are a type of fragmented message. That is, by an IM client, a user can publish his own information in a way similar to sending text messages. For example, the user publishes a microblog message by the IM client at the current moment to state that he is on a plane for a business trip to Beijing. At the next moment, the user publishes another microblog message to describe that he has arrived in Beijing. His followers view the microblog messages published in fragmented times by the user according to the publishing time line of the user, and thus can learn the track of the user.
In actual application, users can also seek help information by microblog. For example, after a user checks in the hotel A in Beijing, he may want to find the restaurants near the hotel A. And then, he can publish a microblog message by an IM client to inquire for the restaurants nearby the hotel A. After receiving this microblog message, those followers who know restaurants near the hotel A can inform the user by pushing microblog messages or replying to him.
It can be seen from the above that according to the prior microblog-based method for seeking help information, followers push relevant help information to a user according to the help-seeking content. Due to the large number of the microblog users, the pushed information is too much and varied in content relevance. For example, the pushed information that is received may include a relatively large proportion of advertising information and information unrelated to the help-seeking information, so that the user has to spend a relatively larger amount of time on browsing the pushed information, which is difficult to identify, the accuracy and the reliability of pushing information is relatively low and the help-seeking efficiency is not high.